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Niebuhr in Britain* Niebuhr’s influence in Britain was far greater than in the German speaking world. His published works were translated almost immediately, and many of his unpublished works were published in English before they appeared in Germany. His influence on English culture and education was enormous in the first half of the nineteenth century. My paper explore the mechanisms and reasons for this influence. In spring 2005 I fulfilled a lifelong ambition. In a letter of 1817 B. G. Niebuhr, at that time Prussian ambassador to the Holy See (1816-23), describes his new apartment in the Palazzo Orsini, which is built in the remains of the Teatro di Marcello:

«Nicolovius will remember the theatre of Marcellus, in which the Savelli family built a palace. My house is the half of it …The apartments in which we shall live, are those over the colonnade of Ionic pillars forming the third story of the ancient theatre … these enclose a little quadrangular garden, which is indeed very small, only about eighty or ninety feet long, and scarcely so broad, but so delightful! It contains three fountains – an abundance of flowers; there are orange trees on the walls between the windows, jessamine under the windows. We mean to plant a vine besides»1.

It so happened that a former pupil of mine was holding a position similar to that of Niebuhr, as Irish ambassador to the Vatican; and because of restoration work at his official residence in the Villa Spada by the Porta San Pancrazio on the Gianicolo (once Garibaldi’s headquarters during the siege of Rome in 1849), he was compelled to take refuge in the same apartment that Niebuhr had rented in the Teatro di Marcello, which now belongs to the daughters of the famous author and society beauty, Iris Origo2. So I was able for the first time to visit, indeed to reside in the garden and the apartments which had so entranced Niebuhr two hundred years ago. A delightful formal orange grove lies in the former cavea of the theatre at first floor level, the three fountains are still there and some of the trees may go back almost to the

* An early version of this paper was given in January 1997 to the seminar series «History of

Scholarship from the Renaissance onwards» at the Warburg Institute, organised by Christopher Ligota. I am grateful to the participants then and at the Madrid conference for their comments.

1 Life and Letters II.99; cf. 256. 2 See Caroline Moorhead, Iris Origo, Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (London: 2006).

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time of Niebuhr (the palazzo was extensively renovated soon after his stay there). Here it was that the modern study of Roman history was born. During the first half of the nineteenth century Niebuhr was the most famous and most widely translated classical scholar in Europe; he is indeed the most important international figure in classical studies in the century which runs from Winckelmann to Mommsen. Here I want to consider his impact on the study of ancient history in Britain, where he became the centre around which the new school of critical history was developed and the most important influence on the formation of British classical education in the early nineteenth century. Barthold Georg Niebuhr was born in the then Danish province of Holstein in 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr the great orientalist and explorer of Arabia; in his childhood he became acquainted with Voss, the translator of Homer. He studied at Kiel University (1794-6) and entered the Danish public service; after six years as private secretary to the Danish Minister of Finance, in 1806 he was invited to Prussia, where for four years he was a member of the circle around Baron von Stein, the great reformer and architect of modern Germany, struggling to rebuild the finances of a state crippled by Napoleon at Jena. In 1810 he resigned in dispute with the financial policy of Harden-berg, and at the age of 34 accepted the post of historiographer in the new university of Berlin. From 1810-13, «in the evil time of Prussia’s humiliation», he delivered his famous lectures on Roman history. In 1813 he published the first edition of his History of Rome before returning to public life to take part in the negotiation of the treaties consequent on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and the liberation of Prussia. From 1816-23 he was

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Prussian ambassador in Rome, and from 1825 to his death in 1831 he returned to academic life as Professor at the University of Bonn. As a young man Niebuhr had visited Britain from June 1798 to November 1799; his experiences are recorded in his Life from his journal and letters written to his betrothed; unfortunately his letters to his parents, which «contained many details of general interest respecting English political and civil institutions, the character of the nation and remarkable individuals» were later burned, and only nine letters survive. The 22 year old graduate of Kiel University was at the time primarily interested in a career in the public service. In London, apart from visiting Pope’s garden at Richmond, meeting Captain Bligh of the Bounty, and visiting the theatre where he saw Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth, he spent much of his time in reading about India in Sir Joseph Banks’s library. He acquired a lifelong admiration of the English constitution and the «superior, almost universal cultivation of the burgher class» (who however were little interested in politics or philosophy); but he met only friends of his father in the Royal Society and the British Museum: «I positively shrink from associating myself with the young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness». Indeed since he was in London only from June to October, when most people were out of town, he cannot have expected to meet many interesting people. It is however characteristic of the culture of that age that it never occurred to him to visit either Oxford or Cambridge, where the moribund state of classical studies (and indeed of university life in general) was notorious throughout Europe. «Of the English scholars … I have a very mean opinion: I keep to my assertion, that they are without originality; also that England can boast of no true poets at the present time»3. Instead Niebuhr went north to the real intellectual capital of the British Isles, Edinburgh, a city then at its height as the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment; on the way he was very interested in the agrarian aspects of his journey, the miserable villages of Bedfordshire, and the prosperity of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. At Edinburgh he enrolled for a year as a student of science – physics, mathematics, anatomy, but also natural history, botany and agriculture. Apart from the universal drunkenness of both lowland and highland Scots and the fact that «beauty is extremely rare in Scotland», he was much impressed by the academic life of Edinburgh, where the philosophy of Kant was already well known; though he seems not to have heard the professor of moral philosophy since 1785, the famous Dugald Stewart. He also spent a lot of time studying the estates and practices of his

3 Life and Letters 118f.

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Scottish acquaintances. In November 1799 he returned to Copenhagen, to take up a post as Assessor at the Board of Trade for the East India Department and Head Clerk of the Standing Commission of the Affairs of Barbary (in charge of the consulates in Africa) – and to be married. Niebuhr regarded his year in Edinburgh as the foundation of his career in politics and finance. But at this time «philological and historical studies he only prosecuted by himself, and by way of recreation. In these departments he regarded the learned men there as incomparably inferior to the Germans». The most important strand in Niebuhr’s new conception of history is perhaps his interest in agrarian matters, together with the principles of source criticism; and Scottish lowland agriculture undoubtedly had a significant effect on his views of the peasant society of early Rome. But the young Danish scholar found nothing to interest him in the historical studies of the city of David Hume (died 1776) and William Robertson (died 1793), let alone in an England which Gibbon had left in 1783, to return in 1793, but only to die within a year. It is curious that among his Scottish acquaintances one name is missing, that of Walter Scott. This is perhaps one of the most surprising missed opportunities of the Romantic age; for Walter Scott was then a young lawyer only five years older than Niebuhr, just married to a young French refugee and already at the centre of Edinburgh social and intellectual life; he was busy translating from the German, and collecting and composing his first border ballads.4 It was of course Scott who was the other main influence beside Niebuhr on the transformation of European historiography, by his demonstration of the power of the historical novel to create a new form of history. It was also Scott who by collecting and reviving the border ballad tradition in British poetry, offers the closest analogy to Niebuhr’s well known ballad theory of the origins of Roman history. When a generation later Macaulay recreated Niebuhr’s lost ballads in his famous Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), he was at the same time continuing the literary ballad tradition of Walter Scott. But, as far as I have been able to discover, the historical theories of Niebuhr were evolved independently of the poetry or ideas of Scott, and the two young men never met. During their later years of fame, they were undoubtedly aware of each other’s existence, for it is recorded that in May 1832, three months before his death, Scott visited Niebuhr’s disciple, secretary and successor as Prussian ambassador in Rome, Chevalier (later

4 Scott’s first major publication was precisely in 1799, a translation of Goethe’s play Goetz

von Berlichingen. For this period of his life see J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, (Paris: Galignani, 1838) I., ch ix.

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Baron) Bunsen; knowing Scott’s interest in popular poetry, Bunsen arranged for his children to sing to him German ballads of the war of liberation of 18135. One consequence of Niebuhr’s visit to Britain was that he became a recognised expert among the Anglophiles in the circle of Baron von Stein; when Stein’s lifelong friend and fellow liberal politician, Ludwig von Vincke, published his account of the English administrative system in 1815, Darstellung der innern Verwaltung Grössbritanniens, it was edited by Niebuhr, who notes that the author did not have the opportunity to study Scottish institutions (p.vii)6. The first edition of Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1811-12) was a product of «a time full of hope, when the university of Berlin was opened»; from 1810 to 1813 he lectured on Roman history during the French occupation and invasion of Russia: «to have enjoyed this, and to have lived in 1813, this of itself is enough to make a man’s life, notwithstanding much sad experience, a happy one»7. The second edition was written after his period as ambassador in Rome, when he was professor at Bonn, and was published in 1827-30, with a third posthumous volume in 1832. Although the two editions differ in important ways8, they were marked from the start by the application of Niebuhr’s new source critical method to the history of Rome, which was conceived as a Vico style conflict between patricians and plebeians, ending in the struggle of the orders and the Twelve Tables; according to Niebuhr, this reality could be dimly detected in the narrative of Livy, which was itself based ultimately on the survival of popular plebeian ballads. By the time of the second edition Niebuhr was already famous throughout Europe; within a year two young historians at Cambridge, Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall, began publishing a translation of it (1828-32), to which in 1842 two other important figures in our story, Leonhard Schmitz and William Smith, added the final posthumous volume. The translation provoked immediate controversy in Britain since it rejected the evidence of the only surviving ancient source in favour of the author’s modern theories;9 5 Frances Baroness Bunsen, A Memoir of Baron Bunsen (London: Longmans, 1868), I. 374f. 6 I have used the second edition (Berlin: 1848) published by Niebuhr’s son for the benefit of

the German navy. 7 I quote from the preface to the first English edition (Cambrdige: 1828), p. x. 8 See A. Momigliano, Secondo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: 1960),

pp.74-7. 9 On its publication it was attacked (in a review of Dr. Granville’sTravels by John Barrow) in

the Quarterly Review on the grounds of Niebuhr’s alleged political opinions and religious unorthodoxy, to which Hare replied in a pamphlet entitled A Vindication of Niebuhr’s History of Rome from the Charges of the Quarterly Review, (Cambridge: 1829).

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Throughout its subsequent long life as a standard history it continued to be controversial, and was often attacked in works such as that of George Cornewall Lewis, the liberal politician and translator of August Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens, which was entitled On the Credibility of Early Roman History (2 vols. London 1855)10. Niebuhr’s influence was not confined to the study of antiquity: he came to symbolise the ability of the modern scholar to think for himself, sub-ordinating the ancient evidence to his own theories. It was indeed Niebuhr who was the catalyst behind the emergence of modern historical studies in Britain, for he liberated historians from the tyranny of the ancient text as the paradigm of truth: for the first time historians could use their imagination and their critical skills to portray the past «as it really was». The dangers to religious orthodoxy of this new historical approach were recognised from the start. Even before Niebuhr’s influence could be felt in Britain, H.H. Milman’s History of the Jews (3 vols 1829) had caused a scandal in both High and Low Church circles by presenting the Jews as an oriental people «more or less barbarians», and Abraham as a «nomad Sheik»; this «was the first decisive inroad of German theology into England: the first palpable indication that the Bible could be studied like another book; that the characters and events of the sacred history could be treated at once critically and reverently». The book was withdrawn soon after publication, and the series in which it was published collapsed11. As a later writer put it, «In this work came a further evolution of the truths and methods suggested by Bentley, Wolf and Niebuhr, and their application to sacred history was made strikingly evident»12. Niebuhr’s historical method, which similarly involved the dethronement of the «sacred text», was also regarded as a dangerous form of unorthodoxy connected with the criticism of the foundations of Christianity espoused by German theologians. In the universities the translation of Niebuhr’s History began a new epoch in historical studies; modern history and indeed historical theology were not then taught to students, and instead they came to the new critical history 10 See on this work Momigliano, Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: 1955),

pp.256-62. 11 A.P. Stanley, Essays chiefly on questions of Church and State (London: 1870), p. 576. In 1863 the

work was republished in a revised edition with some concessions to orthodoxy and an excellent preface by the author defending his approach. Milman’s subsequent histories of Christianity (1840) and of Latin Christianity (1854-5) did not improve matters, for they continued to pursue a historical rather than a theological approach to the history of religions. For this movement see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: 1952).

12 A. Dickson Wright, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: 1896).

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directly through Niebuhr and the study of ancient history. In the course of its long life the History of Rome had an enormous influence in Britain; according to Niebuhr’s protagonist Bunsen, «a much larger number of copies of the English translation…have been sold than of the German original»13. Even before its translation Thomas Arnold, the great reforming headmaster of Rugby (later briefly Professor of Modern History at Oxford), had been persuaded by Hare to learn German in order to read the first German edition; he reviewed it in an article on early Roman history for the Quarterly Review in 1825:

«In our literary intercourse with Germany, we have hitherto been as passive traders as the Chinese: we have suffered our own productions to be exported, without any desire to import those of our neighbours in return; or if we have purchased any of their commodities, we have trafficked like savages, bartering things of real value for the mere glass beads, toys and tawdry finery of those with whom we have traded».

According to Arnold the works of Niebuhr, Creuzer and Wachsmuth on early Rome were different; he commends Niebuhr especially for his approach to source criticism, his collection of the fragmentary evidence and his use of Roman law to uncover the origins of Roman social history14. In 1827 Arnold met Bunsen in Rome and in 1830 made a famous visit to Niebuhr himself in Bonn15. The «essay on the social progress of states» published in Arnold’s 1830 edition of Thucydides (appendix 1) introduced Vico to the English world and linked him with Niebuhr in the creation of a theory of the origins and decline of aristocracies16. Arnold’s own History of Rome was the first work in Britain explicitly to follow not just Niebuhr’s subject matter but also the Niebuhrian method of historical research: in his preface he describes it as an attempt «to practise [Niebuhr’s] master art of doubting rightly and believing rightly». The work was begun in 1838 and was intended to extend «to the revival of the western empire, in the year 800 of the Christian era by the coronation of Charlemagne at Rome»; but at Arnold’s death in 1842 it had only reached the third volume and the second Punic War. Similarly in Cambridge Niebuhr’s translators Thirlwall and Hare were inspired to create a short-lived classical journal, The Philological Museum (1831-3), in emulation of the master’s Rheinisches Museum; and Thirlwall

13 Life and Letters, ii 451-2. 14 Quarterly Review 32 (1825), 67-92; the quotation is at p. 84f. 15 A.P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold 2nd edn. (London: 1890),

p.497. 16 Reprinted in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold D.D. (London: 1845), pp.79-112.

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began to follow Niebuhr’s methods in a major new History of Greece which was published in 8 volumes (1835-44). Cambridge, rather than Oxford, would indeed have been the centre of the new school of ancient history in Britain, if these two men had received more encouragement. But Hare left to become a country clergyman, and Thirlwall was deprived of his tutorship for publicly suggesting that compulsory daily attendance at chapel for students should be abandoned17. Their departure (Thirlwall to exile in Wales, Hare to a family living in southern England) saw the disappearance of Cambridge from the intellectual map of ancient history for a full century18, until Moses Finley arrived as an exile from the United States in 1955. In Oxford, the other English university, the study of ancient history had been from 1800 a compulsory part of the BA for all students; and the influence of Niebuhr on university teaching was profound: his views and methods dominated the subject for forty years, from 1830 to 187219. During this period the main text for the study of Roman history was the first decade of Livy, studied under the influence of Niebuhr. Travers Twiss (later Professor of Law, architect of the ruthless Constitution of the Belgian Congo, and victim of a famous libel case which ruined his career)20 wrote a four volume Niebuhrian commentary on Livy (1840-1) and a 360 page Epitome of Niebuhr’s History of Rome designed for students (1836). They certainly needed it: Mark Pattison describes the life of a student in the 1830s:

Then the text of Livy alone did not quite fit one out for answering their questions on the early history of Rome. One was expected at that time to know something of Niebuhr’s views; I set out to discover these for myself, not in an epitome, as I ought to have done – there were such things – but by reading for myself the two volumes of Thirlwall’s translation. A ploughed field was nothing to this. It was a quagmire, a Serbonic gulf, in which I was swallowed up21.

17 D. A. Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: 1955), pp.73-8. 18 The most distinguished Cambridge ancient historian in this period was the Irish educated

J.B.Bury, who was officially professor of modern history (1902-27). The subsequent long reign of F.E. Adcock (1925-51) produced little apart from the monumental and old-fashioned twelve volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History (1923-39); the Oxford trained A.H.M. Jones was the first professor of distinction at Cambridge (1951-70). Moses Finley himself was chief architect of the modern revival of ancient history and of classics in general in Britain; he was professor from 1970-9.

19 See my chapter in The History of the University of Oxford vol. VI Nineteenth-Century Oxford, ed. by M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys, Part I (Oxford: 1997), pp.520-42.

20 On Twiss see the frank account of his life in DNB: he was forced out of public life when he tried to defend his wife’s honour in a libel case, which collapsed when she was revealed not to be a Polish aristocrat but an adventuress with a lurid past.

21 Memoirs (London: 1885), pp.84-5.

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A contemporary student parody of the new practice of written examinations offers this examination question:

Niebuhr, from observing that caps have tassels, and that the streets of Oxford are not macadamized, comes to the conclusion that the University of Oxford was originally inhabited by Pelasgi, which he further confirms by observing that the inhabitants of it depart and return periodically, according to the vacations, in which we see the migratory habits of the Pelasgi exemplified. State the force of the argument22.

In truth the reading of Niebuhr was always a thankless task for those who believed in history as narrative. «One imagines oneself at the bottom of a mine, with the murky light of a lamp, close to a miner scratching laboriously at the hard rock», wrote Hippolyte Taine23. In the debate on reforms of 1850 Benjamin Jowett complained of the triviality of the endless and meaningless succession of Volscian wars24. Nevertheless this was the education of all British intellectuals in Victorian England; as late as 1861 a student handbook still declared «that incomparable historical genius left little for others to do in this department»25. It was only finally in 1872 that the new Mommsenian view of Roman history was accepted: Polybius replaced Livy as the primary text for study, and Roman history was declared to have begun with the Punic Wars. Since that time until almost the present day, Livy has not been seriously studied by historians in Britain: I well remember the incredulity among my elders which greeted the first signs of a renewed interest in Livy, with the famous article of Arnaldo Momigliano, «An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome» in the Journal of Roman Studies for 1963, and Robert Ogilvie’s Commentary on Livy 1-5 (Oxford 1965). Outside the older universities, London was an even greater centre of the influence of Niebuhr. Leonhard Schmitz had studied under Niebuhr at the university of Bonn, and had been private tutor there to the future Prince Albert; a native of Alsace he married an Englishwoman, and moved to Britain where he proceeded to spread the new historical gospel. In contact with Thirlwall and Chevalier Bunsen, he published in 1844, in English and for the first time, his notes from the lectures of Niebuhr on Roman History which he had heard in the 1820s: for this he received a gold medal from the King of Prussia. This text was actually translated back into German, and provoked the publication in Germany of a complete official set of Niebuhr’s

22 Scriblerus Redivivus [E. Caswall] Art of Pluck (Oxford: 1835), p.7. 23 G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century 2nd edn. (London: 1952), p.22. 24 B. Jowett and A.P. Stanley, Suggestions for an Improvement of the Examination Statue

(Oxford: 1848), p.27. 25 Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class (Oxford: 1861), pp.112-3.

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lectures. These in turn were successively translated into English by Schmitz, beginning with a version of the Lectures on the History of Rome improving yet further on the German edition (in three volumes, London 1849)26, Lectures on Ancient History ( three volumes, London 1852) and Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography (two volumes, London 1853). In each case Schmitz claimed to be able to improve on the German editions by consulting his own notes taken as a student of Niebuhr. By now, at the height of the Germanophilia created by Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert, Schmitz was a figure of great importance, as Rector of Edinburgh High School and private tutor to the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. From 1843 to 1850 he founded and edited the only classical journal in Britain, the Classical Museum; it was subtitled «a Journal of Philology, and of Ancient History and Literature» and was once again modelled on Niebuhr’s Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Geschichte und griechische Philosophie,. His collaborator in many of these enterprises was his fellow translator of the third volume of Niebuhr’s History, another famous Victorian figure: William Smith was one of the first graduates of University College London, who studied law before coming to Latin and Greek, became a master at University College School, and produced a series of famous reference works and dictionaries, together with an edition of Gibbon; he ended as editor of the Quarterly Review (1867-93), and received an honorary degree from Oxford (1870) and a knighthood from the Queen (1892): now long forgotten, his obituarist could once claim, «his name will always be associated with a revival of classical teaching in this country»27. Behind this translating activity stood the indefatigable Christian Bunsen who had lived for 22 years in Rome as Niebuhr’s secretary and later his successor as Prussian ambassador (1831-8); in 1836 he founded the famous Istituto Germanico, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Like Schmitz, Bunsen had also married an Englishwoman, and came to London as Prussian ambassador from 1842 to 1854: in London and Rome his acquaintance included almost every literary, political and religious figure of the day28. 26 This book had a third edition in 1869, rearranged to provide a standard textbook of which I

posess a cheap one volume edition published in 1903 which calls itself the ninth edition. Being more extensive and more readable than the History of Rome it seems to have been used as a standard textbook at least until the publication of H.F. Pelham’s Encyclopedia Britannica article appeared as Outlines of Roman History (London: 1893).

27 See the DNB. The reference works are still useful, and are indeed currently being reprinted under the editorship of C.A. Stray.

28 His biography (above n.5) makes reference to Heyne, Niebuhr, A. von Humboldt, Boeckh, Schleiermacher, Lachmann, Bernays, Schopenhauer, Savigny, Mendelssohn, Platner, Thorwaldsen, Leopardi, Champollion, Chateaubriand, Renan, Sir Walter Scott, Arnold,

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When he sought a translator for the Life and Letters of Niebuhr he approached first Sarah Austin, the wife of the Utilitarian legal philosopher John Austin professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, but she was apparently not available; he then turned to Susanna Winkworth of Bristol, like Sarah another educated woman brought up in Unitarian circles who turned to translation as a means of using her talents; she later became his literary secretary and translator. She produced the excellent Life and Letters of B.G. Niebuhr and Selections of his Minor Writings in three volumes (1852), which established Niebuhr in Britain as the model of a modern historian, statesman and public servant29. Thus his friends and admirers kept the memory of Niebuhr alive in Britain through translation and adaptation; it may be said that for more than a generation after his death in 1831, he was a far more important figure in Britain than in Germany. But his influence runs deeper still, into the literature of the period. His ballad theory of early Roman history influenced the Romantic view of epic deeply, and caused Macaulay to reinvent the lost ballads in the most popular poetic work of the nineteenth century, Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). Generations of late Victorians were taught to compose ballads in the style of Scott and Macaulay, and their children were brought up learning by heart these poems. Through Macaulay, Niebuhr may be said indeed to have had a powerful effect on the education of the administrators of the British Empire:

Lars Porsenna of Clusium By the nine gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more … «Oh Tiber! father Tiber! To whom the Romans pray, A Roman’s life, a Roman’s arms, Take thou in charge this day!” So he spake, and speaking sheathed The good sword by his side, And with his harness on his back Plunged headlong in the tide.

Stanley, Thirlwall, the Hares, Carlyle, Florence Nightingale, Layard, Max Müller, Wellington, Gladstone, Macaulay, Peel, and Palmerston. In 1839 he received an honorary degree from Oxford with Wordsworth.

29 On these translating activities see S. Stark, Behind Inverted Commas (Clevedon: 1999) esp. ch. 2. For the biographies of these two women see the full accounts in the new on-line Oxford DNB.

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No sound of joy or sorrow Was heard from either bank, But friends and foes in dumb surprise, With parted lips and straining eyes, Stood gazing where he sank; And when above the surges They saw his crest appear, All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry, And even the ranks of Tuscany Could scarce forebear to cheer.

Macaulay goes on to describe how this ballad is sung on winter nights by the fire, «When the oldest cask is opened, And the largest lamp is lit». It is a scene straight from Niebuhr’s imagination. But greater poets than Macaulay were influenced by Niebuhr. He is closely associated with the history of the word «palimpsest»; in 1816, as he was proceeding south to take up his post in Rome, news of Angelo Mai’s discovery in the Vatican library of palimpsests of classical texts hidden in manuscripts reused for Christian writings was reaching the European world. In 1814 Mai had found lost speeches of Cicero, in 1815 manuscripts of Plautus, the unknown letters of Fronto and, most dramatically of all, in 1819 he found large sections of Cicero’s lost work de republica, previously known only from its use by Saint Augustine as a major inspiration in his City of God. Passing through Verona in 1816, Niebuhr himself discovered the long-lost Institutes of Gaius, which was immediately recognised as the missing foundation text of Roman law; on his arrival in Rome he located in the Vatican library further fragments of Cicero speeches and of Seneca and Hyginus (which were published in 1820). Niebuhr found himself competing and collaborating with Mai in work on this new material. Suddenly through Mai and Niebuhr the concept of the palimpsest entered the Romantic consciousness. Giacomo Leopardi used Mai’s discoveries to characterise the rebirth of the Italian nation in one of the most famous of all his poems, Il Palimpsesto, addressed to Angelo Mai in 1820:

E come or vieni Sì forte a nostr’orecchi e sì frequente, Voce antica de’ nostri, Muta sì lunga etade? e perchè tanti Risorgimenti?

[And how do you sound so strong in our ears and so insistent, ancient voice of our fathers, silent for so long an age? and why such renewals?]

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This ballad of the Risorgimento inspired the revolutionaries of the age to such effect that it was suppressed by the Austrian authorities30. For Leopardi the palimpsest was inscribed in the soul of the Italian people; for the English Romantics it presented an image of the individual soul. The origin of this important Romantic metaphor in the new discoveries is clear. The first recorded modern usage of the word «palimpsest» in English occurs in a reference in the Gentlemen’s Magazine for 1825 to «Monsignore Angelo Mayo..celebrated for his discoveries in the «Palimpsestes» (Gentl. Mag. XCV. I. 348). In 1838 Arnold’s History of Rome mentions Niebuhr’s discovery: «The Institutes of Gaius … was first discovered … in a palimpsest, or rewritten manuscript of … works of S. Jerome, in the Chapter Library at Verona». (Hist. Rome I. 256 note). But as I have myself recently discovered31, it was Coleridge who first used the word metaphorically of the human memory in 1829. In the second edition of his «collected poems» he writes:

I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory: and I can only offer the introductory stanza, which had been committed to writing for the purpose of procuring a friend’s judgment of the metre, as a specimen32.

Thereafter for the Romantics the palimpsest became the metaphor for what since Freud we have learned to call the subconscious, that multiple layering of consciousness from childhood onwards, from which lost early memories may suddenly emerge: «What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?» wrote Coleridge’s disciple, Thomas De Quincey, in Suspiria (1845) Wks. 1890 XIII. 346. One of De Quincey’s most famous essays is indeed entitled «The Palimpsest»: in this he plays the mock instructor of the ignorant female mind:

«You know perhaps, masculine reader, better than I can tell you, what is a Palimpsest. Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet, for the sake of others who may not know, or may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here: lest any female reader, who

30 As Paolo Desideri reminds me, Leopardi also knew Niebuhr personally and his work well,

and was asked to review the English translation of the History of Rome on its appearance in 1828. In his Zibaldone 4450-4458 Leopardi copied out some ten pages of Niebuhr’s theory of the carmina convivalia. For their relationship see P. Treves, Lo Studio dell’antichità classica nell’ottocento (Milan: 1962), pp.480-9; L. Polverini, «Lettere di Giacomo Leopardi a B.G. Niebuhr», Rivista storica italiana, 100 (1988), 220-33; P. Desideri, «Leopardi e la storia romana del Niebuhr», in Leopardi a Firenze, ed.by L. Melosi (Firenze: 2002), pp.321-38.

31 This is my proud contribution to the latest on-line edition of my great-grandfather’s Oxford English Dictionary.

32 Coleridge, prefatory note to The Wanderings of Cain (1829).

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honours these papers with her notice, should tax me with explaining it once too seldom; which would be worse to bear than a simultaneous complaint from twelve proud men, that I had explained it twelve times too often. You therefore, fair reader, understand that for your accommodation exclusively, I explain the meaning of this word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the office and privilege of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We are, under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So that if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by courtesy to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you will always seem not to know it. A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions»33.

In Aurora Leigh (1856) Elizabeth Barrett Browning uses the same image in a curiously complex inversion of the historical realities, in which it is God’s text which is overwritten with a pagan romance:

Let who says «The soul’s a clean white paper» rather say, A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s, – The apocalypse, by a Longus! Poring on Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture (Aurora Leigh I. 826)

In the second half of the 19th century the influence of Niebuhr on ancient history in Britain declined; this period increasingly belonged to George Grote and Theodor Mommsen. With Mommsen Roman history came of age; but the novelty of George Grote in his successive volumes on Greek history published from 1846 to 1856 (more often admired than read) has been exaggerated. It did not rest either on his critical approach to the sources or on his assimilation of German scholarship; in these he was a typical late example of the Niebuhrian school of history. His reputation as an innovator depended rather on his careful style of argument, pedantic and almost hesitant but always sensible, and on his relentless modernisation of ancient history in order to fit Utilitarian conceptions of social justice and the history of liberty; and even his introduction of contemporary radical politics into Greek history had been pioneered by Bulwer Lytton34. The influence of Niebuhr on Britain was both deeper and significantly different from the impact that he had in his native German language, and

33 Thomas De Quincey, « The Palimpsest », Suspiria de Profundis (1845). 34 See my introduction to E. Bulwer Lytton, Athens: its Rise and Fall (London: 2004), pp.1-34.

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went far beyond the creation of a professional school of history35. I end therefore with the observation that the translation of academic texts is part of a complex activity of cultural transference which affects the consciousness of an age both scientifically and at all levels of its spiritual life. It is not possible to understand the nature of British intellectual culture in the first half of the 19th century without taking account of the multiple effects of the phenomenon of Niebuhr.

35 For his influence in Germany see S. Rytkönen, Barthold Georg Niebuhr als Politiker und

Historiker, (Helsinki: 1968); G. Walther, Niebuhrs Forschung,(Stuttgart:1993), neither of which have anything to say about Britain.

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Works of Niebuhr published in English The History of Rome by B.G. Niebuhr, translated by Julius Charles Hare, M.A. and Connop Thirlwall, M.A., 2 vols. (Cambridge 1828). The History of Rome by B.G. Niebuhr, translated by Julius Charles Hare, M.A. and Connop Thirlwall, M.A., New edition 3 vols. (London 1851). The third volume was in fact translated by Leonhard Schmitz and William Smith. Lectures on the History of Rome edited by Dr. Leonhard Schmitz, 2nd edn 3 vols. (London 1849 ; [1st edn 1844]); many subsequent editions. Lectures on Ancient History translated by Dr. Leonhard Schmitz, 3 vols. (London 1852). Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography translated by Dr. Leonhard Schmitz 2 vols. (London 1853). The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr with Essays on his character and influence by the Chevalier Bunsen and professors Brandis and Loebell 2 vols, with The Life and letters of Barthold George Niebuhr, and selections from his minor writings vol III supplementary edited and translated by Susanna Winkworth (London 1852).